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Two United States soldiers run past the remains of two German soldiers toward a bunker during WWI. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Humans are a sentimental species, making much of anniversaries and reunions. We’re probably not far from extending our sentimental capacities to observing anniversaries of anniversaries, like aging baby boomers who argue over which Woodstock reunion was the best because their memory of the original is fading into the mists.

Already we are seeing the first trickle of articles and books that will reach a flood by summer noting the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. These retrospectives come in two types. The first is the never-ending historical argument over causation of the catastrophe whose derangements of the European equilibrium have not completely subsided today. The various diagnostic camps formed into fixed positions decades ago: “miscalculation” (Barbara Tuchman) economic and demographic asymmetries (Marxists and other varieties of material determinists), or fear of rising rival power that spurs preemption (the various descendents of Thucydides).

The second retrospective mode comes from those who wish to dilate the famous remark that Mark Twain probably never said: “History doesn’t repeat itself—but it rhymes.” Given that World War I was a surprise, a war that was thought to be impossible right up to the moment it wasn’t, could we wander into the same kind of conflagration today? There are lots of plausible candidates for the locus of a world-splitting cataclysm, ranging from a rising China or that crucible of conflict since the beginning of recorded history—instability and ambition for conquest (or revenge) in south central Asia. Certainly the rise of radical Islam in recent decades has taken the place of revolutionary Communist, socialist, and fascist ideologies that did so much to disrupt the 20th century in the aftermath of World War I.

Perhaps this retrospection on causal catastrophism will represent the much wished-for inversion of Santayana’s injunction to recall history so as not to repeat it. As was the case before World War I, there are many secular reasons for optimism beyond the fine-toothed combing and re-telling of the political mistakes of 1914. China is probably just too large and unwieldy to become a genuine threat of global war. North Korea would be rolled up quickly if it ever acted seriously on its belligerent rhetoric. India and Pakistan—or Iran and everyone in its neighborhood—may come to open war at some point (or the Syrian and Libyan civil wars may spread), and bad as that prospect is it would not likely spill over beyond the region or draw in the remaining world powers. European disarmament—the great windmill of the 1930s—is coming to pass by degrees, the result of welfare-statism more than authentic Kantian pacifism. Before long most of Europe won’t be able to fight each other even if they wanted to. (Better watch out for those old Russians, though. They didn’t get the memo from Brussels.) The terror threat will be with us for a while, but can’t by itself plunge the world into a total war.

Beyond the geopolitical hypotheticals, Steven Pinker and others have noted that violence in the world, as measured in open conflicts and deaths, has been declining significantly for the last several decades. The warfare that leading nations engage in today, such as the U.S. campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, resemble the pre-1914 world of professional armies and remote battle plains, with conflicts that did not involve whole populations like World Wars I & II. Perhaps the promise of modernity, which was at the root of Progressive optimism a century ago, has belatedly come to fruition?

One aspect of the Great War story of a century ago seems to be missing from the growing inventory: the changes to the idea of Progress itself, and the rise of the administrative state in its wake. The conventional wisdom for many years in U.S. historiography is that the coming of World War I entailed the end of the Progressive Era and its momentum for reform. It is certainly true that World War I put paid to the easygoing faith in inevitable progress that prevailed everywhere in the advanced industrial nations before the war, and gave way to the existential pessimism of the interwar period that in turn brought us fully to today’s “postmodernism” that openly disdains progress in just about every form.

But it is quite wrong to suppose that World War I ended Progressivism. To the contrary, it accelerated the rise of the modern administrative state that is the defining feature of what goes by the label of “Progressivism” today. The British historian A.J.P. Taylor made this point inadvertently at the time of the 50th anniversary of World War I: “Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card.”

The same was true of the United States, where the brand new income tax barely reached 10 percent on a small handful of the highest incomes, and regulation was confined to a few well-defined agencies overseeing a small number of national industries and markets. But as Taylor correctly notes, “All this was changed by the impact of the Great War.” Far from ending “Progressivism,” World War I provided the launchpad for a century of wholesale expansion of administrative government in the United States, starting with jacking up the income tax to over 90 percent and then, in World War II, extending its reach to the lowest rungs of the middle class. Coupled with the crisis of the Great Depression, “Progressive” government hasn’t looked back. In other words, if you’d described to Progressive reformers in 1910 the course of American government over the next century, they wouldn’t have regarded World War I as the end of their dreams, but rather as the turning point. Not for nothing did Randolph Bourne say that “War is the health of the State.”

But the story has a strange aspect today. Today’s so-called “Progressives” bear little resemblance to the Progressives of 1914. Most of them don’t really believe in progress any more, or measure it only according to how much egalitarian redistribution can be imposed on an unwilling people (such as Obamacare). The older Progressivism of 1914 was implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, utopian, and expected its final result would be a happier people living in blessed harmony with the benign administrative state. Perhaps the most salient aspect of the present moment is the record high number of Americans who recent polls find distrust the federal government. Gallup’s latest poll finds 72 percent of Americans find Washington to be the largest threat to their freedom today.

That’s not the way the Progressive story was supposed to play out. No wonder today’s so-called “Progressives” are such an angry and dispirited bunch. The great question, 100 years on, is whether the most lasting consequence of World War I can be halted and reversed. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another cataclysm to undo the ratchet of the ever-expanding administrative state.